The reason, written before the result

We are all quietly rewriting our own reasons, and we do it so smoothly that we never once catch ourselves at it. After a decision turns out well we remember having been sure of it all along. After one goes badly we remember the doubts we supposedly harboured from the start. The memory tidies the record in our favour every single time, and the story it hands back to us is that we are rather good at this, whatever this happens to be. The only remedy I have ever found is embarrassingly simple. Before I know the answer, I write down the reason.

In the corner of the world I write about, money, this goes by the grand name of a decision journal, but there is nothing grand about it. Before I do anything of consequence I write, in plain sentences a stranger could follow, what I believe to be true, why I believe it, and what would have to happen for me to be shown wrong. Not a prediction of the outcome, which is a mug's game, but an honest snapshot of the thinking exactly as it was, gaps and hunches and all. Then I put it away and let the world get on with whatever the world is going to do.

Months or years later I read it back, and this is where the whole exercise earns its keep, because the note does not care in the slightest how I feel about myself now. It shows me, without flattery, how much of a good result came from sound reasoning and how much came from a fair wind I had no hand in arranging. It shows me the confident paragraph that led precisely nowhere, and the hesitant one, hedged and unsure, that turned out to have seen the thing clearly. Left to my memory alone I would have filed the lot under skill, because memory is a loyal friend and a hopeless historian.

What surprised me, when I began doing this in earnest, is that being right more often was never the point and never the result. The point was becoming honest about how right I had actually been, which is a different and far more useful thing. Temperament, that word everyone reaches for about investing as though it were something you are simply born holding, is really just the residue this habit leaves behind. It is what is left of a person after they have caught themselves out enough times to stop trusting the flattering version of events. You grow slower to congratulate yourself, quicker to notice luck, and a good deal calmer, because you are no longer lugging around a heroic story that the facts might one day come along and puncture.

And none of this belongs only to money. Whatever the decision you actually care about, a job, a move, a long project, a hard conversation you keep postponing, write the why before you know the what happened, in your own plain words, and seal it. You will not enjoy reading some of them back. That discomfort is the entire value. It is the sound of a person meeting themselves as they really were, rather than as they would have preferred to have been, and I know of no faster way to grow up, at any age and in any pursuit at all.